The hype of social network tools
Jinfo Blog

30th April 2009

By Udo Hohlfeld

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Nielsen released data that showed Twitter suffers from high attrition rates (http://digbig.com/4yqxd). But don't social networks need high user retention levels to grow and turn their service into a profitable business? Up to 60% of first-time Twitter users drop off the service after a month according to Nielsen. It seems that there are a lot of people who do not see how Twitter can be useful for them. And of course, yet, Twitter provides only one service - sending and receiving short messages of up to 140 characters. If you do not like (or need) this, why should you return? Other social network tools such as LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, MySpace et al. enjoyed the user enthusiasm in their beginning as well. But they developed further and offer more services to their users, turning sheer enthusiasm into usage of valuable services. It will be interesting to see how Twitter will develop further and extend beyond the hype and provide a diverse portfolio of valuable services. Microsoft might have a Twitter challenger at start. It is called Vine and now released for public beta (http://digbig.com/4yqxe). Microsoft developed Vine to be a dashboard of news and activities of a closed member group. Members stay informed of what goes on within their community. So, acutally talking about Vine, one can speak of a mixture of current social network tools, e.g. Twitter and Facebook. Let us see if there will be a similar hype on Vine as on Twitter and if this hype is justified. In the end, it depends on the value delivered to a broader audience and a potential business model. And Vine seems to address this broadness by providing services to people, organizations, communities and even the government as well as the business model by including data feeds from more than 20,000 media sources and public safety organizations. Vine may be able to proof that it sometimes pays out to lag behind hype trends.

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